request for advice - free range kid?

[metaphortunate]

Advice requested:

The time is coming soon when the Junebug will be tall enough to climb out of his crib and need to switch to a toddler bed.

This is causing me to lose sleep with visions of a two-year-old wandering about the house unsupervised while Mr. E and I are (optimism, I know, given the newborn) asleep. I just lie awake and see him pulling bookshelves down on himself. Falling out of windows. Turning on the stove and burning himself. Figuring out a way to climb up to the knife blocks or the poisons shelf.

People who have dealt with this already: how did you deal with this? Did you lock them in their rooms? Did you put up baby gates? (We think at the point that he can climb out of his crib he'll be able to climb over a baby gate, but maybe that's not so.) Did you somehow manage to babyproof the whole house? What did you do?

Comments

[thistleingrey]

At 18 mo my daughter's crib lost its front wall, and at 22 mo she moved to a twin bed (frame is solid with built-in drawers beneath--no crawling space) plus a stool to get up onto it. (We would've waited on the twin bed, but since we moved house then, it seemed easier to get the transition over with.) Till she was ~2.5 yrs, she waited to have us come and get her, though granted, at first she was a younger child than the Junebug is and it may've made her relatively tentative. Now she peeks around the doorway to look for me, and if she can't see me immediately, she seeks me or darkforge, not mischief. She'll be three within two weeks.

We had a baby gate keeping her out of our room at the old condo (unprotected bookshelves and a desire for me to sleep while I could sleep), but otherwise, since I'm a light sleeper (darkforge is not!), I figured that I'd be able to hear most perils. Much depends upon child personality. The "new" house is only minimally childproofed since move-in: chemicals under the kitchen sink under childproof lock, but other things are only moderately up out of reach--enough that her climbing up would make enough noise to wake me. It's a small house, and she understands both that knives can hurt her and that her parents would be very upset if she cut stuff up randomly. I am guessing that Something will happen within ages 3-5, but 2-3 has been totally fine....

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, the problem here is that our place now is big enough that he could climb up to the knife block in the kitchen and we would not hear it in the bedroom. :(

[lovepeaceohana]

If the knife block is the biggest concern, you might want to keep them in a locked drawer (I know, bad for the knives) - you can get kid-proof latches that install into them, or the more hardcore magnet locks. We've never really had trouble with knives because the kids have seen the results of mishandling them (a carrot got away from me while the kids were watching, it was just ugly enough to put a fear of knives into them) but we keep ours in a fiddly-to-open top drawer anyway, because yeah, there was virtually no place for a knife block to live with us that was not also easily accessible to a curious kid. There's a lot to be said too for "out of sight, out of mind," especially at this age.

[metaphortunate]

The knives, the windows, the bookcases that can't be bolted to the wall for a few months, the poisons (probably not reachable? It's hard to know just how good he is at climbing, or when he will learn to open the baby locks on the cabinets! That will happen eventually!)